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Washington: Can you
trust someone you just met and if you can, how do you do it?
People face this predicament all the time. US researchers suggest
that it could be done by observing a person's non-verbal cues.
Using a robot named Nexi, Northeastern University psychology
professor David DeSteno and collaborators Cynthia Breazeal from
MIT's Media Lab and Robert Frank and David Pizarro from Cornell
University have figured out the answer.
For instance, nonverbal cues can offer a look into a person's
likely actions. This concept has been known for years, but why
they do have remained a mystery, the journal Psychological Science
reports.
Collecting data from face-to-face conversations with participants
where money was on the line, DeSteno and his team realised that
its not one single non-verbal movement or cue that determines a
person's trustworthiness, but rather sets of cues, according to a
Northwesern statement.
"Scientists haven't been able to unlock the cues to trust because
they've been going about it the wrong way. "There's no one
golden-cue. Context and coordination of movements is what
matters," DeSteno said.
People are fidgety - they're moving all the time. So how could the
team truly zero-in on the cues that mattered? This is where Nexi
comes in. Nexi is a humanoid social robot that afforded the team
an important benefit - they could control all its movements
perfectly.
In a second experiment, the team had participants converse with
Nexi for 10 minutes, much like they did with another person in the
first experiment. During the interaction, Nexi - operated remotely
by researchers - either expressed cues that were considered less
than trustworthy or expressed similar, but non-trust-related cues.
Confirming their theory, the team found that participants exposed
to Nexi's untrustworthy cues intuited that Nexi was likely to
cheat them and adjusted their financial decisions accordingly.
"Certain nonverbal gestures trigger emotional reactions we're not
consciously aware of, and these reactions are enormously important
for understanding how interpersonal relationships develop. The
fact that a robot can trigger the same reactions confirms the
mechanistic nature of many of the forces that influence human
interaction," said Frank.
This discovery has led the research team to not only answer
enduring questions about if and how people are able to assess the
trustworthiness of an unknown person, but also to show the human
mind's willingness to ascribe trust-related intentions to
technological entities based on the same movements.
"This is a very exciting result that showcases how social robots
can be used to gain important insights about human behaviour,"
said Cynthia Breazeal of MIT's Media Lab.
"This also has fascinating implications for the design of future
robots that interact and work alongside people as partners,"
Breazeal said. The subconscious mind is ready to see these
entities as social beings.
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